Why does Preacher Blair have so little to say about this evil, genocidal maniac?

Last updated at 08:22 15 March 2007

This is the question that troubles me. Why doesn't Tony Blair care about Zimbabwe? Perhaps that should be re-phrased. Why doesn't he care at all about Zimbabwe?

No one would doubt that this tragic, ruined country - a former British colony - is worthy of his concern. The terrible beatings this week of the Zimbabwean opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and his supporters is the latest episode in Robert Mugabe's increasingly horrific rule.

Starvation, hyper-inflation, torture, repression, corruption on a mammoth scale - these are the hallmarks of Mugabe's regime.

The 83-year-old monster far surpasses most of the dictators with whom Mr Blair has engaged, and almost rivals Saddam Hussein's genocidal tendencies.

In 1984, Mugabe wiped out many thousands of his political opponents in Matabeleland in the south of Zimbabwe.

He is just the sort of man whom you would think the high-minded, interventionist Mr Blair would inveigh against, and whose country you might even expect him to invade.

In a swirling, passionate speech the Prime Minister made at the Labour Party conference in 2001, he declared: "The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us."

Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, the robber barons of Sierra Leone: all of them have, with varying success, been 're-ordered'.

But not Mugabe. Far from invading his country, or even threatening to do so, Mr Blair has restricted himself to a few glancing criticisms of the Zimbabwean president over the years. Robert Mugabe does not begin to stir Mr Blair's normally ample moral outrage.

Why should this be? One answer is that Zimbabwe, a former British colony with virtually no Muslims, does not interest the United States, and Mr Blair, as we know, likes to trot behind George W. Bush.

No doubt if Mr Bush had developed an ambition to 'Get Mugabe,' Mr Blair would have pricked up his ears and embraced the plan, but the American president has given no indication of even knowing where Zimbabwe is.

Yet America's lack of interest in the country hardly explains Mr Blair's almost total silence on the matter. Government ministers were yesterday stumm.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, heroically roused herself into issuing a brief statement on the Foreign Office website in support of the unfortunate Mr Tsvangirai, which I suppose marks a small improvement on her predecessor, Jack Straw, who was once tricked into shaking Mr Mugabe warmly by the hand.

There are deeper reasons, I suggest, for Mr Blair's and this government's unwillingness to concern themselves with Zimbabwe.

Even now, after Mugabe has devastated what was once one of the two or three most prosperous countries in Africa, he remains in some measure the creature of the Left, whose election as President in 1980 was rapturously greeted by Tony Benn in his diaries.

The man who then spoke for a large faction in the Labour Party could not "remember anything giving me so much pleasure for a long time."

Throughout the 1970s, Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) was the country the Left hated above all. Its white Prime Minister, Ian Smith, was depicted in the liberal media as little better than a fascist.

Without doubt he was intransigent, and he was fatally slow in encouraging plausible moderate black leaders to emerge.

Yet Rhodesia thrived economically in those years, despite international sanctions, and the rule of law was for the most part preserved.

Today, almost any black Zimbabwean not belonging to the governing party who remembers that time will tell you that the 'fascist' Ian Smith was far preferable to Robert Mugabe.

Yet leftist journalists and politicians welcomed Mugabe's election, preferring the Marxist 'freedom fighter' (and former Roman Catholic mission boy) to the more moderate Bishop Abel Muzorewa, and ignoring or discounting the atrocities his guerillas had committed.

When Mugabe unleashed his North Korean-trained 5th Brigade on the hapless Matabele in 1984, the Left largely looked away as, alas, did the Tory administration which had inadvertently engineered his triumph.

Indeed, it was not just the Left that became besotted with Mugabe. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, successive British governments merrily sold him Hawk fighter aircraft and other weapons, and as recently as the late 1990s the Blair administration was supplying him with hundreds of armoured Land Rovers, which have been used by the police against demonstrators, such as Morgan Tsvangirai and his brave opposition supporters last Sunday.

Only when Mugabe recklessly confiscated thousands of highly productive white-owned farms almost overnight, thereby leading the country towards economic collapse and starvation, did his blinkered supporters in the West finally melt away. Even so - witness Mr Blair and this government - they could not bring themselves to address him robustly as the dangerous genocidal maniac he undoubtedly is.

'Regime change' in Zimbabwe may never have been a sensible option, but Britain, as the former colonial power responsible for bringing Mugabe to the position he now occupies, could and should have spearheaded an international moral crusade against him.

It should have shamed South Africa into action, that country having been endlessly indulgent of Mugabe, to the point that one fears it may partly approve of him. As a neighbouring, much richer and more powerful country, South Africa could apply pressure on Mugabe, yet does nothing.

Ian Smith's regime attracted international obloquy and, in Britain, he became the Left's most hated figure. My God, they were obsessed with him! Yet even now Mugabe's truly evil regime is seldom harshly criticised - President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana was notably uncensorious when he was interviewed yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme - and the media have sometimes been slow to wake up to the enormity of what is happening in Zimbabwe.

The BBC, which has been banned from the country, has too often ended up by ignoring it.

We shouldn't. Zimbabwe, for better or worse, is the product of British colonialism. Our policies brought Mugabe to the presidency.

How can we turn aside from the country's wretched and persecuted people? It is time for those on the Left (and in this matter Mr Blair is oddly unreconstructed) to concede that Mugabe is, and always was, a tyrant and a killer, in whose young mind those Catholic missionaries instilled no abiding Christian principles.

Even one speech from Mr Blair - a mere expression of disgust - would be a small blow for democracy and freedom. A powerful diplomatic initiative could amount to much more.

It would give some hope to the millions of people who have been starved and impoverished by Mugabe, and to the opposition forces that are daring to stand up to him. Some show of interest from the Tories would also not go amiss.

Here, even now, the Prime Minister might do some good in his dying days, and leave a useful legacy behind him.

Mugabe is old, mad, and weak, threatened as he is by factions within his own party. He could be toppled. This is a cause worth fighting for. And yet I am almost certain that Tony Blair will do nothing at all.